- [Narrator] Welcome to Grace Digital presentation.
In this video, we'll be covering five things
you should know about Apostle Paul.
Number one, his background.
So who was this man?
Well, the Bible tells us more about Apostle Paul
than any other apostle in the Bible.
In fact, a third of The New Testament
is either by him or about him.
If you put the Book of Acts together with all his letters,
you will find out that over one third of The New Testament
focuses on this one man.
Apostle Paul has had more influence
on 2,000 years of church history
than on any other person except Jesus himself.
You could even go as far saying
he's had more significant impact
on the history of Europe than any other man.
Well, there was Paul before his conversion,
during his conversion, and after his conversion.
Those are the three major phases of his life.
Well, before he was converted,
he was born in a place called Tarsus,
which is in Southeast Turkey.
He had Jewish parentage, he was a Jew,
and he was very proud to be a Jew.
He was from the tribe of Benjamin
and was named after the first king of Israel
who also came from the same tribe.
Saul had a belief that Christians are dangerous.
He felt this is the greatest threat
to our Jewish faith that there's been
and I'm going to fight it hard.
At the end, that same passion was used to spread the Gospel.
Paul set off as an anti-Christian missionary.
He was willing to be a missionary against Christians
and to leave his own land to go
and prosecute Christians elsewhere,
so he was a missionary before his conversion,
but on the wrong side.
Now that's a bit of his background.
Number two, his benefits.
He had two significant benefits.
One, he spoke Greek,
which was a popular language at the time.
The other was Roman law.
His father became a Roman citizen
which made Saul a Roman citizen also by inheritance.
So here is a unique combination
of Jewish-Greek and Roman background
ideally fitted to be a missionary for Jesus
to the Gentile world, he had the perfect credentials
to spread the Gospels, but how was God to use him
if he persecuted Christians?
That leads us to number three, his conversion.
Before his conversion, Saul was a Pharisee of Pharisees
who intensely persecuted the followers of Jesus.
According to the account in Acts,
his conversion took place on the road to Damascus,
where he reported having experienced a vision
of the resurrected Jesus.
He fell to the earth and he heard a voice saying unto him,
"Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?"
Saul replied, "Who art thou, Lord?"
And the Lord said, "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest."
He was blinded for three days
and had to be led into Damascus by the hand.
During these three days, Saul took no food or water
and spent his time in prayer to God.
When Ananias of Damascus arrived,
he laid his hands on him and said,
"Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus that appeared unto thee
"in the way that thou camest hath sent me
"that thou mightiest receive thy sight
"and be filled with the Holy Ghost."
His eyesight was restored and he got up and was baptized.
So that was his Christian birth,
but it is fascinating that he did not begin
his missionary work immediately,
and very quickly he aroused hostility.
Paul was going to incite hatred wherever he preached,
but primarily from Jews.
Paul's preparation for ministry
would be exciting to some of us.
It took him 13 years after God called him
for Paul to begin what God called him to do that day.
This would be a surprise to many of us today
because we are typically in a hurry to begin things.
So what happened during those 13 years?
Three of those years were spent in Arabia
where Paul had to think and rethink
through his entire theology.
During that time, Paul did not go to college,
he didn't need to consult anybody but the Lord.
Paul was the special one, just like the other disciples,
he was also called by Jesus.
Then, there was a man called Barnabas.
Barnabas was a good man, he was the one
that introduced Saul to the Christian church in Jerusalem.
The Jews hated this.
They saw Paul as an enemy.
He was one of their best rabbis in training
and now he's one of those hated Christians,
and so he was sent back to Tarsus for 10 years,
and that was how Paul spent his 13 years
after he was called.
He spent three years in Arabia thinking it through
and 10 years back in his hometown,
after which he was confirmed.
He had a double call, from the head
and through the church.
So he went forth with a double call.
Number four, missionary work.
So Barnabas and Saul went together
to spread the word of God, and off they went.
Now, Antioch was to be the center
and the ripples were to spread out until they reached Rome.
Paul's first goal was to spread the word
through the whole of the Northeast Mediterranean world,
as far as the capital of the empire.
And that's what he and Barnabas set out to do.
They went to Cyprus first, after which they went back
to the mainland.
Paul's strategy was to create a community of Christians
in every major city and then move on from there
as quickly as possible.
Paul did not seek to cover every single town.
He found the hub of a province and then planted a church.
The church then went on to evangelize themselves
from then on, and this proved
to be a very successful strategy.
Instead of trying to spread the word of God all by himself,
he planted a live church and then said,
now you evangelize this province, I'm moving on.
In the Book of Romans, Paul says,
"It was my ambition not to work
"where everybody else had worked."
He sought to break open fresh ground in unbroken territory
and so he pressed further and further until crossing seas.
The Gospel came to Europe for the first time ever
and since that time, Europe hasn't been the same.
He was flogged many times
to within an inch of his life stone and left for dead.
Having planted churches and having moved on,
of course he had to follow up his work
and he had a care of all the churches.
And he often did that, he went back
to these little group of churches
one year after he planted them
and was able then to appoint elders in each place,
and once an apostle had appointed local elders,
his job was done.
So the other way in which he followed up
was to write letters, and that's why we've got
all these letters in The New Testament,
that was his way of following up his evangelism.
Number five, his motivations.
The final question is what actually
made Paul the man he was?
What were his motivations?
If you look at the life of Apostle Paul,
three things take hold.
The number great motivation of his life was Christ.
There is no doubt that Paul
absolutely lived for Christ alone.
From the day he met him at Damascus,
he was totally absorbed with Jesus.
That was why he said, "If I die, I'm better off."
Paul referred to himself as a servant of Christ.
He oftentimes would begin his letters, saying,
"Paul the Apostle, a slave of Jesus."
And to be a slave in the ancient world was to be despised.
You were totally owned by somebody else.
You had no spare time of your own,
no money of your own, nothing of your own.
You were in complete ownership to someone else.
And he called himself a slave to Christ.
And yet, Paul also referred to himself
as an ambassador for Christ.
That was an interesting combination of high and low,
of social standing.
He was a slave, yet an ambassador.
He was proud to be an ambassador,
and again, pleased to be a slave.
His second great motivation of his life was the Gospel.
He would have done anything to spread the Gospel of Christ.
And that is why he could find pleasure
in a very terrible place like prison,
even when he was chained to a Roman soldier,
he also saw that as an opportunity to spread the Gospel.
He was happy to say,
"We now have Christians in Caesar's household."
While he was in prison, some people grabbed his pulpit
and preached out of rivalry to him
and were glad he was locked up
so that they could grab his platform.
And he says in Philippians,
"I hear they're doing it out of rivalry and jealousy of me."
But to that, he said,
"Hallelujah, the Gospel is being preached."
Can you imagine his focus was the Gospel?
He is a man who lived for the Gospel
and he said, I owe it to everybody.
Just like he had discovered the cure of a pandemic,
he saw as his responsibility to spread the word,
he saw himself as a debtor to both the Jew and the Greek.
That's why he was an ambassador
and he would go anywhere to tell anybody
what God had done in Christ.
The third great motivation of his life was grace.
Paul could never get over the fact
that Jesus claimed him when he was on his way
to put Christians in prison.
He just could never get over the fact
that what he was was totally undeserved
and that if Jesus had given him what he deserved,
he'd have been in hell.
He just couldn't get over.
That's what grace means.
It means something that you just don't deserve
that is freely given to you.
It's summed in the statement in Romans.
Paul says, "While we were yet enemies, Christ died for us."
And of course, that was so true of him.
He was an enemy, he was using his whole energy
to fight against Christ, and Christ said,
I'm going to use you, you're going to be one of my,
this grace for you.
It's gratitude.
And you can see that the motive of gratitude
is behind so much of this man's labors.
He was so grateful for being treated so contrary
to what he deserved that the grace of the Lord Jesus
become the motivation of his life.
Those were the three big things in Paul's life.
Christ was the biggest, he was in Christ.
The Gospel was the thing that he wanted others
to have more than anything else.
And the sheer grace of God was what motivated him.
We hope you were blessed and encouraged
even as we tried to spread the message of God also.
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